David farmerʼs body of work: A retrospective and prospective view

Abstract

David Farmerʼs work is too often misunderstood, perhaps because of the truly imaginative metaphors that he employs for expressing it, and the seemingly paradoxical prescriptions that it leads to at the level of practical action. This problem is helped by elaborating the grounding in which his work is at least implicitly set (namely, Traditionalism in American public administration) and by considering its congruence and compatibilities with the best of such contemporary organization theory as Demingʼs approach to organizational and management practice. With such clarified understanding, it becomes obvious that his work opens the way to a truly new 21st century model of public administration both in theory and in application.